OK, I'm splitting these posts off to a separate thread in Troubleshooting. Will be better off there.
Ouch. This thread was supposed to land in Troubleshooting, not in Translation stuff.
Anyway, I am quite uncertain if Windows 98 would boot from an external drive.
What you could alternatively do is buy a 40-gig HDD (or 80-gig one, depending what HDD sizes your motherboard accepts) and simply install it on the secondary IDE channel along with your optical drive. Then you can control which HDD boots through the BIOS, which is actually even more convenient.
Also, what file system your W2K harddrive is using? FAT-32 or NTFS?